France is a curious country. Politics is a funny trade. Emmanuel Macron is not a president like the others. But how much are 1 + 1 + 1? Alexis Kohler, whose Le Figaro Announces the departure, has just had a unique experience by being, for eight years, secretary general of the Elysée, the least enlightened function in the public square and yet the most powerful.
We are in the summer of 2023. At the end of an exhausting year, who saw the Head of State be re -elected, the war reinstalls on European territory and the country to blood and at fire due to a pension reform which repels the legal age of departure, Alexis Kohler takes two weeks of vacation. And what is a man like him during his summer holidays? There is a question that all tourists do not necessarily have in mind: basically, if the executive had opted for an even greater effort, the 65 years, would that have changed much? As long as going there … The rest of the events will only reinforce his intuitions. Soon most European countries will still push the age of departure, some will even think about putting it at 70. And the secretary general of the Elysée will observe the movement with irony: decidedly, France is an island, the French are different. A curious country, you were told.
And politics a funny trade. In October 2022, Emmanuel Macron was on television, for two long interviews on international politics and his repercussions on the interior situation. Alexis Kohler went to the offensive, he wants at all costs that his dear president does not go there by four paths: that he says things, at the risk of offending! That it explains that taxation does not solve everything, that only the State can absorb the cost of the increase in electricity and that this is not without consequences. The president will do so, the secretary general will noted that the ministers do not jostle at the gate to relay the presidential speech. Whatever the way to turn the problem, you have to work more, it’s not that the message is complex, it’s only that it is complicated to assume.
Alexis Kohler was often sorry to note that here, and here only, the priority of priorities remained permanently the purchasing power, which he sells or that he snows. And that it was a fight lost in advance. He also cursed the right, unable to behave like a government party, advocating savings without ever displaying them seriously, he cursed the left, only capable of increasing taxes to resolve his financial equations.
“My nature, my duty, is to be pessimistic”
Any work is unfinished, said François Mitterrand at the end of his presidency. Alexis Kohler, so proud of the reforms on the work of the beginning of the first Macron five -year period, would have dreamed of the big evening for the school, he never stopped pushing for the vocational high school, “the largest unemployment factory in France” as he sometimes noticed, be reformed from top to bottom. He has always pleaded for nothing to slow down this reforming ambition, be it great crises (yellow vests, covid) or the country’s political deadlines. He frequently hammered that if we pilot reforms according to the elections, it was the end of the beans. He didn’t say it like that, beans are not an Alsatian specialty. It would be readily bet that dissolution is not what he preferred to experience at the top of the state. An inexpensive dish for rational stomachs (and minds).
It leaves when the West threatens to collapse, when Europe no longer rhymes with peace, where China advances its pawns, where the United States is making their revolution. If this addition does not give “a huge kick in the buttocks” to the French, then nothing can ever cause a start at home. “My nature, my duty, is to be pessimistic,” he repeated regularly. But fatality is not the kind of house. Anyway, he has always been convinced that it was impossible to continue to do as before. The risk in his eyes is not that the French do not understand it, is that they understand it too late.
The era was not necessarily his best ally, he who was one of those for whom the truth is not an opinion like any other. In February, he accompanied Emmanuel Macron when he visited Donald Trump. In recent days, he told his visitors that the election of the American president had released the wildest forces of certain leaders in the world. He will now look at the irrational directing the world from further away, without risking burning there.
.